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I'm disappointed, however, that code metrics and code refactoring are not available for unmanaged C++ projects. On the other hand, C++ projects can use a very nice call browser: It gives you a compact view of the other functions that call a given function, and of the lines of code that do the calls.
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I'm happy that Visual Basic projects have code metrics along with an incredibly concise syntax, great IntelliSense, and many code snippets. I'm disappointed that Visual Basic projects don't have code refactoring, although this functionality can be added using one of several third-party plug-ins.
I'm delighted to report that unit testing is now a feature of the Professional Edition. (It was a VSTS feature in VS05.) You can create unit tests and test projects for C#, Visual Basic, and managed C++ solutions. It was possible to do this before using the free open source program NUnit, but it's a little nicer having the unit test capability integrated with the IDE.
IntelliSense for JavaScript was one of the promised improvements in VS08. It's there, but at a cost: Although support for the sort of JavaScript used to write ASP.Net AJAX and Silverlight pages has been added, support for editing VBScript and Classic ASP has been dropped. As I am still maintaining a 1999 vintage Classic ASP site, I was more than a little annoyed to find that VS08 did a worse job with ASP pages than VS05, or indeed than Visual InterDev 6. Microsoft is considering restoring this functionality for a service pack to VS08. Meanwhile, people who still maintain Classic ASP sites should not abandon their existing tools.
WPF, Silverlight, and Web 2.0
VS08 supports Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) with a split-pane WPF designer, debugger support, and WPF project templates
for C# and Visual Basic. WPF "supports UI, media, documents, hardware acceleration, vector graphics, scalability to different
form factors, interactive data visualization, and superior content readability," according to Microsoft. WPF graphics are
defined by XAML, an extension of XML. The split-pane WPF designer uses a GUI in one pane and XAML in the other, and synchronizes
the two bidirectionally as long as you don't introduce errors into the XAML.
VS08 supports Silverlight, a rich Internet application technology that includes a subset of WPF, once you install the Silverlight SDK and the Silverlight Tools for VS08. I had good experiences developing Silverlight applications with a beta version of VS08. (For my review of Silverlight itself, see "Microsoft Silverlight rivals Flash, AJAX.")
With the exception of the dropped support for VBScript and Classic ASP, the Web page design surface in VS08 is better than that of VS05; it's very similar to Expression Web, and supports CSS nicely. Design surfaces and projects for ASP.Net AJAX, Windows Communications Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation, which were free add-ons to VS05, have moved to the base VS08 product.
Office and Smart Device targets
Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) has been merged into the VS08 Professional Edition and above; it was previously a separate
$799 product. VSTO now supports all the components of both Office 2007 and Office 2003 in both C# and Visual Basic.
